YIKES!
Adult readers have the right to expect and demand that writers not condescend to them but treat them with respect -- challenge them, unsettle them, refuse to talk down to them. Personally I don't want false comfort, I don't want to read writers who flop in to join me in the shallow end where, like most people, I sometimes find myself cowering out of fatigue or disappointment or the natural human aversion to spiritual deep waters. I want to read writers like Franz Kafka or Mary Shelley or Mavis Gallant or Cormac McCarthy who grab be by the hair and haul or pitch me out into the deep end of the pool and say Swim, you bastard, your life depends upon it.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
I may have mentioned this before, but I'm reading a really fascinating, wonderfully interesting book.
. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
It is a very drizzly, rainy day out there, and I am sitting at a Starbucks after work. The internet signal is quite weak so I'm not sure if this will even post at all, but I'll try.
Why, he wondered, did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions – not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?
Dear Readers!
← Even though I deliberately starved him all day in preparation for his role in these proceedings, he initially was not all that enthused about these white foreign objects in his food dish!
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
Hi friends.
Dear Friends:
Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall.
Have you ever gone to COSTCO, just thinking you were going to walk around in there and not buy stuff, and then what happens is you buy half the store?
Whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it’s because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.
Recently I said to a friend, “I fear that I’m reading so much material I’m forgetting the relevant aspects of the contents.”
Somehow the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it is their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.
Expensive clothes are a waste of money. 
I’m calling it “annual” even though this is only the first one.
The Child In Time, by Ian McEwan 
“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
Here is something a friend sent me:
There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them. 
It's fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.
Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
…Coffee, that is!
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds -- how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives -- and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
The short story is like an old friend who calls whenever he is in town. We are happy to hear from it; we casually fan the embers of past intimacies, and buy it lunch.
← Albert Einstein, out for a stroll, and yes, the arms do seem to be fairly unswung, smashing my current theory to smithereens….
When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
He blends in so well with my couch,
The ever regal Jack, after a hard day of....... sleeping.
It’s not thinking about what happens after death that’s interesting. It’s realizing that one day you’ll know.
When I was a kid, [and by “kid” I mean as far back as my memory can go] I was terrified about the fact that I would have to learn how to write.
If you were an ancient barbarian, I bet a real embarrassing thing would be if you were sacking Rome and your cape got caught on something and you couldn't get it unhooked, and you had to ask another barbarian to unhook it for you.
